Searching for pulsars in PALFA data from Arecibo
13 Dec 2008 21:00:04 UTC
Topic 194085
(moderation:
We are starting some limited public testing of a new pulsar search on Einstein@Home. This search uses data from the PALFA collaboration, taken at the Arecibo radio observatory. Science information will be available in this thread in the Science Message Board area.
Please use this thread (which is in the Problems and Bug Reports Messsage Board area) to report bugs and problems with this new search. This is especially useful during our initial public testing!
Bruce Allen
Director, Einstein@Home
Searching for pulsars in PALFA data from Arecibo
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How do we recognize these tasks? Do they have a different name or different application?
Will they download if running
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Will they download if running the optimized apps, or do we have to remove the app_info and run standard?
If we want to take part, can
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If we want to take part, can we please have instructions on how to do so.
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
There is no need for you to
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There is no need for you to do anything, the tasks will be issued randomly between the usual "HierarchicalSearch" tasks. The number of tasks will be very limited during the testing phase (628 workunits at a time), it is rather unlikely you get one. The name of the application will be "einsteinbinary_ABP1" instead of the current "einstein_S5R4". You will be able to opt-out from the "Arecibo binary pulsar search" in your Einstein@home preferences (once the App is in the database, which will be some time tomorrow afternoon CET). Users currently running the Windows Beta App will not automatically get ABP1 tasks, I'll publish instructions and a new app_info.xml in the Beta App thread in the next days. For various technical reasons the ABP1 App will not be available for Mac OS X on PowerPC.
BM
BM
It would be good idea to put
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It would be good idea to put info at server-status about how many WU is present in the system.
RE: It would be good idea
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There sure will be once this goes into production, but with the test set of just a few hundred units, it will be more like now-you-see-them,now-you-don't.
CU
Bikeman
The first 628 "ABP1"
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The first 628 "ABP1" workunits are being produced right now and should be delivered in about 1h.
For this to happen our scheduler runs in a new "mixed" mode, which could break something for the normal operation (S5R4 workunits), too. We did our best to test this, but haven't done this before on the scale of the whole project.
On a machine that needs about 9h10m for a S5R4 task a ABP1 task ran 6h12m.
BM
BM
RE: It would be good idea
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That's a good idea. We'll modify the server status page to show this.
Director, Einstein@Home
RE: RE: It would be good
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Thank you.
Two issues are (now) known
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Two issues are (now) known for this application:
1. On Windows 98/ME the communication between the worker and the screensaver isn't working, i.e. you'll see the starsphere, but not the data that's usually displayed. That's a common problem to all MinGW-built Windows Applications (i.e. S5R4 Beta Apps, too). We're working on this.
2. The App had a bug that occasionally lead to "general access violations" / "segfaults", preferably on Windows. The bug was in the part of the application that communicated with the screensaver, it didn't affect the scientific computation. This bug has been fixed and a new application version was published, Tasks that are resent because they errored out previously should be run with the new version of the application (minor version 02).
BM
BM